Tag Archives: week 3 post

The String of Clicks

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I thought I’d check out a few of my classmates posts this week as I felt a bit stuck in what I could publish for the Week 3 posts.

In doing so, I began on Maëlle’s blog and she had a post regarding hashtags (with some pretty kick ass photos from the #foodporn Instagram hashtag, if I may say so myself), but then the post led me to where she got the hashtag post reference which was from Georgina’s blog.

This just got me thinking with how I (and from what I can tell, a lot of my friends) browse the Internet. How often have I found myself watching something, then Googling it… and the next thing I know I’m on YouTube watching something completely irrelevant and 5 hours has passed? Too often.

Just for reference, I’d recently become entangled in watching The X-Files. Just this past Australia Day weekend, I shot through the first season (24 45 minute episodes, mind you). Now not only did I sit and watch these episodes, but after almost every episode ended, I’d find the review on AVClub and read not only the recap, but the user comments. More often than not the user comments consistently link to something else, only sometimes they’re slightly relevant. For example, one of the links led me to a techno remix of dialogue from the show:

Kind of relevant, yes. But according to my Safari history, I then clicked on True Facts of Truth with Jimmy Fallon and Zach Galifianakis which is clearly of zero relevance to what I was initially in search of.

… and I still wonder where my time goes.

Culture/Technology

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This post is essentially a published mental note for myself, I have yet to even finish the Murphie and Potts reading but it’s already just slightly blown my mind.

tech·nol·o·gy

tekhne (Greek) means art or craft and logos (Greek) can mean word, study, or system. The modern use of the word began to emerge in the 1860’s, when it came to mean ‘ the system of mechanical and industrial arts’ due to the rise of science.

cul·ture

Thankfully the reading states that it’s a difficult word to define, because I’ve always had trouble with it. It can refer to encompassing all human activity, to as little as devoting it to a self-contained culture. Many periodicals use culture as the title for the arts and entertainment section. Cultura (Latin) means tending or cultivation, and holds an agricultural reference which later transferred to other denominations.

tech·nique

It’s important to have a distinction between technology and technique. While technique can be defined as ‘the use of skill to accomplish something,’ William Barrett puts technology and technique hand-in-hand as ‘technology is intimately involved with the techniques by which we use it.’

It never really occurred to me that ‘technology’ existed way before computer systems came to prominence in the early 80’s. I guess I was only really aware of the current denomination of the word and the current way in which we use the word as well as technology itself.

More to come as I continue reading…